July 27, 2012

The Stupefying Story Behind Stupefying Stories: an interview with Bruce Bethke

Yesterday, I reviewed the March 2012 edition of Stupefying Stories, an on-going anthology series from Bruce Bethke. Today, I have an interview with the man behind the madness. Enjoy!

Gef:
Here's a tee-ball question to kick things off: What was the
inspiration in starting up Stupefying Stories?

Bruce:
There's inspiration, and then there's motivation.

My two
inspirations were George Scithers, founding editor of Asimov's
and later editor of Amazing Stories,
and Charles C. Ryan, founding editor of Galileo and
later Aboriginal.
Thirty-some years ago, when I was a young punk just starting out in
this business, George and Charlie were the only two editors
open-minded enough to be willing to consider a story by anybody
and patient enough to put up with me. Their advice, guidance,
occasional whacks on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, and
eventually acceptances and publications, were what launched my
career.

They're my inspirations. Then there's my motivation,
which comes from another place entirely. I'd been running an online
writing workshop for several years and was getting tired of hearing
my workshop writers -- some of whom were producing truly first-rate
work -- complain that they just couldn't seem to get a break. So I
started looking into it, and realized that yes, the kids were right;
there really are very
few editors out there now willing to do for today's new writers what
George and Charlie did for me.

So I decided, this is something
I can do.

Understand, I don't need to do this. I am not one of
those people who's always dreamed of someday being a famous editor.
It's even in our business plan: if Stupefying Stories
ever does become commercially successful, the second person we're
hiring is an editor-in-chief to take over the day-to-day running of
the thing.

(Our first hire will be a good administrative
assistant. Believe me, we need one.)

Ergo, I do not do this
for the sake of my own ego. I'm doing this because people seem to
keep wanting to pay attention to me,
because of some stories I wrote twenty to thirty years ago and some
awards that hang on my office wall, and if I can use this attention
to instead redirect their focus onto new
writers, who are doing
great new work now --
well, this would be a good thing, no?

Gef:
You make the distinction that Stupefying Stories is
less a magazine than an anthology series. Did you opt for that method
as a way of focusing on the stories, since magazines tend to contain
other items like essays, poetry, and reviews? Or was there another
contributing factor?

Bruce:
We did consider doing it as a magazine. In fact, a few years back I
pulled together a group of investors and we seriously considered
buying Amazing Stories, which at that time had just gone out
of business again. But the more we studied the idea, the more
strongly we came to the conclusion that launching a new magazine --
or buying Amazing and trying to reanimate Hugo Gernsback's
corpse one more time -- would be a really great way to blow at least
$100K annually, and at the end of the investor's money we'd still
have a dead magazine. I mean, consider the recent death,
resurrection, and final death of Realms of Fantasy as a case
in point.

The age of the subscription-driven monthly or
bimonthly magazine is over. You want book and movie reviews? There
are better and faster places to get them online. You want a letters
column and some sense of interaction with the editor? There's this
thing called Facebook. You want gasbag op-ed pieces and science-fact
articles? For the love of God, why?

The interesting part is,
once we decided to jettison everything that wasn't story, we found we
had a product with a much longer shelf-life. It's the non-fiction
content that makes a magazine ephemeral. Fiction does not age, or at
least it doesn't age as badly as does a book review.

So by
making Stupefying Stories a fiction anthology e-book series,
this immediately lets us put out a product that we can keep on the
market for a long time. A magazine has its month in the sun and then
it's done. We can keep a volume of Stupefying Stories
available for sale for three years, and take the time to build our
readership slowly, as people discover us and go spelunking through
our back catalog.

Thus far the model seems to be working.
Whenever we release a new book, we also see a jump in sales of our
backlist, as people discover that they like what they're reading and
decide to go see what else we've published.

Gef:
What was the first preconception of running a periodical you saw
dashed before your eyes?

Bruce:
Given that I come from a Journalism and non-fiction writing
background and have spent the past thirty years selling to
periodicals and hanging around with publishers and editors, I already
had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. So I guess I
didn't have too many starry-eyed preconceptions waiting to be
dashed.

The one thing I'd say I really underestimated was the
sheer volume of management involved in putting out a
publication. Between processing submissions -- in a slow month we get
around 200 new submissions, and in our peak month so far we received
500 -- recruiting for and managing our ever-growing crew of first
readers, keeping submissions moving through the review | acceptance |
rejection pipeline, handling relations with authors, artists, and
production personnel, and all the other invisible back-office
busywork, I spend one hell of a lot more time managing people than
actually editing and publishing fiction.

As I said before: I
could really use a good administrative assistant.

But since
you're looking for dashed preconceptions, how about this? When I was
on the writer's side of this relationship, I never understood why
editors made so much use of form rejections and so rarely provided
substantive comments. Now that I'm on the editor's side, I fully
understand why. When you're dealing with hundreds of submissions
monthly, there simply is not time enough to provide meaningful
commentary on every submission.

I wish there was. There simply
isn't.

Gef:
The covers for each installment have been a great blend of striking
and strange. Do you offer input to the artists on what the cover art
should look, or is it simply a matter of letting them know what you
need and let them run wild?

Bruce:
Both. I offer input, but that's just the nudge to get the artist
started and give him or her a sense of direction. I love to be
surprised and impressed by other people's talent, so whenever I give
out a cover assignment, I'm always hoping the artist will come back
with something far more awesome than what I had in mind. Thus far,
our artists have done so.

If you think you've seen some cool
covers already, just wait 'til you see what's in the release pipeline
for the rest of this year!

Gef:
How daunting is a slush pile for you? Is there a recurring annoyance
among story submissions that you wish could be wiped from your inbox,
or has the wheat-chaff ratio been easy on you?

Bruce:
Again, I came into this with the benefit of thirty years' experience
and a lot of time spent talking with more seasoned editors, so I had
a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. Our wheat-chaff ratio
has settled into the expected conformance with Sturgeon's Law. About
ten-percent of the submissions we receive are actually worth
reading.

Believe it or not, when we first launched, we were
afraid we weren't going to receive enough good submissions to make a
go of it. That worry lasted about two weeks. Then we started worrying
about how we were going to handle our rapidly growing volume of
submissions.

And then we got hit with the Great Submissions
Blizzard of 2011. More than five hundred stories before it was
over. It took us nearly two months to dig out from under it.

We've
had to evolve very rapidly since then, and invent a lot of processes
from scratch. Being an Internet-based virtual company with staff
spread out across 2,000 miles and three time zones, many of the
submissions handling processes used by traditional publishers are
worthless for us. Just managing contracts when you're dealing with
authors who live on every continent -- and yes, we've even received
stories from people stationed in Antarctica -- is an adventure. Thank
goodness for PayPal.

So, recurring annoyances? Just the usual,
I suppose. Funny stories that aren't. Horror stories that are
nauseating, not scary. Stories written by people whose ideas about
normal human behavior come from watching actors play characters on
television, not from observing real humans in their native habitat.
Space opera written by people who've clearly watched every episode of
every Star Trek series ever made but never had a single
original thought about the idea. Military stories by guys whose
combat experience consists of playing a lot of XBox. True Blood
fan fic. "Little kid discovers that the monster under the bed is
real;" there must be some how-to book somewhere that says this
is the perfect story to write, because we receive it about five times
weekly. Stories from writers who've clearly never read our submission
guidelines, because if they had -- especially this part,
http://www.stupefyingstories.com/p/what-were-not-buying-now.html
-- they'd have known better than to send us that steaming load of
crap they sent.

The most astonishing -slash- depressing thing
to come out of our slush pile so far has been the realization that
there are a whole lot of people running around out there with
advanced degrees in Creative Writing -- BAs, MFAs, even PhDs -- and
absolutely no frickin' clue as to what a story is! They send us
beautiful wreckage -- sensuous sentences, perfect paragraphs,
evocative images, scintillating scenes -- but when you get to the
last page, you're left wondering: what the Hell was that all
about? Five thousand words of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

If
I could automatically filter out one thing from my inbox, that would
be it: the piles of words -- sometimes beautiful words -- that
don't contain any actual story.

Gef:
In the introduction to the March 2012 edition, you cited Beth Cato's
"Red Dust and Dancing Horses" as a stand-out. I, too, have
to say it's one of my favorite stories of 2012, if not the
favorite. When it comes to discovering or providing a stage for
up-and-coming authors, how do you see your role as an editor there?
Do you feel tempted to break out the pom-poms and add cheerleader
to your job description, too?

Bruce:
I think I've already answered this one, but yes, "coach"
and "cheerleader" are definitely parts of my job, and
definitely the parts of it I wish I could spend more time
doing.

However, first I need to get the back-office processes
running smoothly, and then we need get more books out the door. At
the moment we have five books stalled in various stages of
production. We've only released two volumes of Stupefying Stories
so far this year, as opposed to the seven we should have out by now,
so we need to get things moving again. (I should probably mention
that while we didn't hit our plan to release a new SS on July 1, we
did release three full-length novels that day, albeit through Rampant
Loon Press, not Stupefying Stories. So it's not exactly as if
we've been sitting around twiddling our thumbs since March.)

Release
books first. Do cheerleading afterward.

Gef:
Maybe it's me, but I sense a hint of nostalgia in many of the stories
that appear in Stupefying Stories. By that, I mean a harkening
to the speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century--not an
imitation, but a sentiment or like-minded approach to storytelling.
Am I on-base with that or just seeing things through my own
Bradburian lens?

Bruce:
It's interesting that you make that observation. We are not
consciously trying to "go retro" -- well, except for
Throwbacks, but that's a special case -- but all the same, we
seem to get tagged with this label with some frequency. I think this
perceived sense of nostalgia comes from a simple set of stylistic
cues. To wit:

We publish stories. With characters. And plots.
If what you've written is seven thousand words of formless goo about
a hapless schlub who spends the entire narrative sitting in his
apartment, wallowing in a puddle of existential despair and paralyzed
by the bleak meaninglessness of it all, and who in the end goes
nowhere and does nothing, we're probably not the right market for
you. Why don't you instead try it on that depressed Goth chick who
hangs out at your favorite off-campus coffee shop? I bet she'd really
get off on it.

We don't publish porn. We have published
stories with sex scenes: T. D. Edge's "Spirit Bags" in the
January 2012 issue comes to mind, as it has a scene in it that made a
few of our associate editors blush. But we don't publish the kind of
fiction that used to be called explicit hard-core porn, before a
couple of fortuitous Supreme Court decisions made it respectable and
very profitably mainstream.

We don't publish stories about
serial killers, the sexual abuse of children, serial killers who
sexually abuse children, sexually abused children who grow up to
become serial killers, or any other permutation on that those ideas.
If that's your thing, there are plenty of other magazines that
publish it. We don't.

We don't publish stories that seem to be
more about the author's personal sexual problems than about anything
of any interest to anyone other than the author and his or her
psychotherapist.

We have yet to find a compelling reason to
publish a story containing any of the small set of words that used to
be called "obscenities." We've accepted such
stories, but always found in copy-editing that the author was willing
to substitute a more benign word on request. In fact, quite a few
authors have told us they only put those words in in the first place
because they thought they had to, in order to be considered hip,
modern, and edgy.

Look, let's be honest. Walking around with
the word "FUCK" written on your forehead was very
edgy -- in 1968! But if you take a look at the very short list of the
kinds of stories we don't publish, and if it's the absence
of these kinds of stories that defines us as being "nostalgic"
--

Well, maybe being "modern" is greatly overrated.

Gef:
The first year anniversary looms. Anything special planned to mark
the occasion or is it simply full-steam ahead?

Bruce:
No, nothing special. We've got to get Stupefying Stories back
onto a stable monthly release schedule, first. Then we've got two
double-length "theme" anthologies in the works that we've
got to finish up and release, and after that there's -- well, the
usual term is "sister" publication, but this is more like a
"disreputable half-brother-in-law" publication that we'll
be launching this Fall. But more about that another time.

So
no, at this time we are not planning anything special to mark the
first anniversary. We're just trying to get books out the door.

Our
goal is to make it to the three-year mark. If we're still around in
the Fall of 2014, then we'll do some serious celebrating!